As the global headquarters of the Kōyasan Shingon sect of Japanese
Buddhism, Mt. Kōya was registered by UNESCO as world heritage site in
2004. Mt Kōya is well known by Japanese and non-Japanese alike as a
destination to experience a uniquely spiritual atmosphere with
opportunities to participate in Buddhist rituals and teachings.

Mt. Kōya itself has over 120 temples, 52 of which offer lodging
facilities providing a great opportunity to experience and participate
in a monk’s daily life. However, as a guest house, Japanese law requires
that the monks obtain and verify a copy of every guest’s passport,
keeping a record for 5 years. As with all other hotels, hostels and
guest houses authorities could demand to see these records at any time.

Until very recently most hotels and ryokan would take a photocopy and
store it in a binder in a secured location. However, this is time
consuming for operators and detracts significantly from the guest
experience as the photocopying is done out of sight of the guest in the
reception back office.

The monks at the Ekoin performed these duties on a daily basis; however,
the increase in guest numbers meant the process was interfering more and
more with the daily life of the monastery. ATOM resolves all of these
issues in a single process taking only seconds; improving both the
customer and operator check-in experience.

The ATOM® ePassport reader combines the most advanced
technology with a small, elegant design and minimal footprint. Passport
image capture, OCR text conversion and data import complete within just
a few seconds thanks to its USB 3.0 high speed data transfer capability.
This improves the guest check in process significantly and provides
“peace of mind” as the passport never leaves the guests sight. The
Access-IS software meets all of the requirements of the legislation such
as image data store; it provides digitised data eliminating all of the
paper based process.